Speaking to The Times ahead of the review’s first major report, The Case for Change, which is due to be published this week Josh MacAlister said a central theme identified in the review so far is that “we’re doing too much”.
“We’re investigating first when we should be helping,” he said.
“We’ve got a bit of a runaway train at the moment in terms of the continual surge in section 47 investigations, initiations of child protection conferences, that don’t result in further action, that aren’t correlated with an increase in identified harm.”
"Not enough thought was given to the harm done by investigating too readily. We need to take responsibility for it, because it’s not a neutral process.”
MacAlister said debates over child protection often involved a "false choice", that you either support family rights and help for parents, or are in favour of an interventionist system, adding that he wants social workers to be doing more work with families.
“If social workers aren’t able to build relationships with parents based on trust and partnership, then they won’t know what’s going on for these children — and parents won’t be honest with them, for understandable reasons. And the consequence of that is that we won’t be acting in children’s best interests.”
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